The 5 Most Influential Books in My Life

Thinking long and hard about this, the first three came right away, since they influenced me the most in my life, my love for sf&f and my love for writing. The other two came after much consideration and rumination, but were also definitely influential.

1. The Holy Bible

2. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

3. Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

5. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin
 
1. Shogun by James Clavell
2. Fear and Lathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
3. Post Office by Charles Bukowski
4. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
5. Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
 
I'm glad this thread resurfaced, as it combines two things I love, giving my opinion and lists :)

Most influential is an interesting list to consider, as it will probably cover books I read all in my formative years (i.e. 20-30 something years ago). Here goes, in no particular order:

1) Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein What can I say, it introduced me to grand fantasy and I read it at a time I was getting into RPG's. It brings back so many memories of playing AD&D and particularly Rolemaster (which I set in Middle Earth as GM). Yes, I was a college science geek and no mistake.

2) The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy This was probably the first great novel I read outside of school and under my own volition. I fell for Hardy's work and have since read all his Wessex novels.

3) To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer This was not the first SF book I read (that was A Fall of Moondust by Clarke, which just misses the cut), but it was an early one and was hugely influential on me. I followed up reading all the Riverworld books and his World of Tiers series. This was in all in my teens, and surely shaped my appreciation of SF.

4) The Human Factor - Graham Greene Not Greene's greatest work, not his most famous. I could easily have said The Quiet American, or The Heart of the Matter, or many others. I read 15 or so Greene novels in my late teens and early twenties. However, I picked The Human Factor because it's central theme (that you cannot discount the possibility that human connections and emotions may affect key decisions, against all logic) affected my thinking from the moment I set the book down.

5. The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology - Cooper, Bloom and Roth This textbook wasn't even on our reading list at university, but I started to attain an interest in neuroscience physiology and pharmacology and read this book cover to cover while waiting in the laundromat at college. Then I re-read it. Then I did my PhD in neuropharmacology. It was all because the book was pitched so well and I was an interested sponge at the time. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to the lay reader.
 
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
Camus's The Stranger
Eco's Baudolino
Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale
Gaimen and McKeans' Violent Cases (the first comic to make me realize comics could be much more than superheroes)

I appreciate those who added the bible, and it'd probably be somewhere on my list, but my favorite book on the Christian faith is either The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Tolstoy or The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus. (I did used to love reading about all the wars and heroes in the OT while sitting in the pew on Sundays though!)
 
Catch-22 - No book has had a bigger impact on me and my worldview. It's so much more than a war novel; it's a damning indictment of the greed and excess of western capitalism and bureaucracy and the way they reduce human beings to helpless pawns being ground up in a giant machine.

Jurassic Park - This one is twofold... it was one of my first forays into sci-fi and I found it thrilling (plus it scared the heck out of me!). I also was fascinated by the commentary on scientific ethics and "playing god," as well as the interesting take on humanity's place in the grand scheme. Educated in a small religious school, this was one of the first times I began to consider the idea that we were a very small blip on the timeline of an ancient planet.

Ishmael - It's sort of shallow pop philosophy, but an interesting discourse on environmentalism, human (un)exceptionalism, and our delusions of grandeur. I haven't read it in a long time and suspect it doesn't hold up well, but to a rebelling 17yo Catholic-school kid, this was provocative stuff.

Hardy Boys Casefiles #7: Deathgame - I must have been 5-6 when I pulled this randomly off a book shelf at the mall because of the cover, but this kicked off both my reading addiction and my eternal love of a great mystery. If not for the Hardy Boys, I may have missed Doyle, Christie, Collins, Hammett, Chandler, Lehane, Ellroy, etc.

Crime and Punishment - Great Expectations killed my interest in literature as a high school freshman. It wasn't until Crime and Punishment in AP English senior year that the flame was rekindled. I wound up bailing on engineering in favor of lit because of this novel (in retrospect, I'm not so sure that was a good idea financially, but oh well!). The debate between old-school Christian ethics and Raskolnikov's nihilism struck a nerve with this adolescent.
 
Hi,

Tricky one. For me it's a mixture:

Catch 22: Don't know why it's so influential in my life, but I do know that whenever bereauracracy goes a little wonky in my life as it does for everyone I always think of Yossarian. It's more than just a phrase, the book encapsulates the entire concept of the machine systematically grinding people down and that resonates within me.

Shipwreck, Charles Logan: The first sci fi I ever read that had a really bad ending. It has stuck in my mind for thirty years now,and whenever I write the one thing I'm acutely aware of is that I can never leave the reader with nothing. Neither survival of a much admired MC nor a victory.

The Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison: Fabulous character in the rat, and in all the various books of Jim Degrizz he just sings. Fabulous philosophy. Fabulous insights into life. And wonderful humour.

LOTR: What can you say? This was my introduction to brilliantly written epic fantasy. It guides much of what I write and provides an unattainable standard to which I wish to aspire. In the same way the Stephen Donaldson books of Thomas Covenant do for the more recent decades.

Thief, by me: Yes I know that this sounds impossibly arrogant but it's actually not. This is simply the first book I ever completed and published. It's the book that told me I can write a book. And once I'd written it I knew I could write more and better.

Cheers, Greg.
 
My 5 are all books I read when I was about 12/13 and gave me an absolute love of reading. I can still remember a sense of wonderment at the experiance.

1. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
2. Quentin Durward/B] by Sir Walter Scott
3. Seek the Fair Land by Walter Macken
4. The Mark of the Horselord by Rosemary Sutcliff
5. Hounds of the King by Henry Treece

I have another list of more recent reading, but for me these are the books that sit on my shelves, gathering dust waiting for the day I will pass them to my children as they begin their literary journey. Hopefully they will enjoy them, if not...that is ok too.
 
hard one....

1. To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Phillip J. Farmer

Although A Princess of Mars from Edgar Rice Burroughs was the first sf book I read, when I was about 13 years old, this really was the book that got me into reading sf, in my early teens, and luckily my father had a huge collection....

2. Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

3. Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

4. Carl Sagan - The Varieties of Scientific Experience

5. Illias/Odyssey - Homer
 
The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S Lewis, the book that got me into fantasy, I've read it and the others in the series more times that I care to remember.

Shogun, James Clavell, another book that I have read and re-read numerous times. A great piece of storytelling.

The Ganymede Takeover, Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson. Not the greatest example of Dick's work, to be honest, but it was the first one by him I read and I liked it enough to find other stuff by both authors. Never got into Ray Nelson, but have been a PKD fan ever since.

The Caretaker, Harold Pinter. I've been fascinated by Pinter for a long time and the Caretaker is him at his surreal, frightening best.

The Knights of Bushido by Lord Russell. A history of Japanese war crimes during the Second World War. Again a book I've read too many times, but one that exerts a horrible fascination over me.
 
1. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper. I vividly remember how excited I was hearing my English teacher read the first chapter to our class when I was eleven. More than a decade later, it provided much of the impetus for me to start writing myself.

2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien. For good or ill, the bedrock of my teenage years.

3. The Seventh Sword, Andrew Collins. First of many books read in my twenties about psychic questing, ancient mysteries, earth energy etc. All probably bonkers, but made the world a fascinating and at times scary place, and permanently coloured part of my psyche.

4. Healing the Wounded King, John Matthews. Self-help book, unremarkable in many ways, that got me into shamanic visualisation.

5. Up From Eden, Ken Wilber. Explores the development of human consciousness and religion from neolithic to present and beyond. Not sure if it's all true, but provides an interesting framework for thinking about reality and how our gods and goddesses might have arisen. Finally settled me into my current, stable "belief" system.
 
I don't think I have influentail books, just ones I really, really like. But if I was pushed I'd choose:

To Kill A mocking Bird - I loved the simplicity, the clear voice of Scout and the gentle morality.

Dune - because they were the first sci fi series I loved. Prior to that I'd read some Heinlein and Clarke, but this I loved.

Dark Eden - even though it's recent, I thought it did a lot of the sort of character-based stuff I'd like to see more of, and write more of when I'm growed up.

The Playboy of the Western World - I could have chosen anyone of four plays - Waiting for Godot and Long Day's Journey Into Night, or Translations - but stuck to one. Basically anything I've learned about writing dialogue I've learned from plays and these four are particularly strong.

Wuthering Heights for the way it taught me that telling from your soul trumps rules any day of the week.
 
I'll try to list those that changed my thinking in some way. In no particular order:

Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison (1967). Because it opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities of speculative fiction.

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner (1952). Because it taught me how to use scientific thinking to defend myself against nonsense.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975). Because it used speculative fiction to make me feel the importance of feminism.

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer (1975). Because it helped me to develop a personal philosophy based on the ability of an entity to experience suffering.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979). Because it gave me hints of a possible way to think about the mystery of consciousness, while delighting me with its wit and imagination.
 
madrotter said:
hard one....

1. To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Phillip J. Farmer

Although A Princess of Mars from Edgar Rice Burroughs was the first sf book I read, when I was about 13 years old, this really was the book that got me into reading sf, in my early teens, and luckily my father had a huge collection....

2. Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

3. Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

4. Carl Sagan - The Varieties of Scientific Experience

5. Illias/Odyssey - Homer
Click to expand...
We agree on the Farmer, which is interesting to see. I could almost agree on the Homer, but I read Homer too late for its to have been influential to my thinking. I enjoyed the Dawkins, but it wasn't influential for me, as I found I had already thought almost everything he had to say in the book.

Far more influential though (and your mentioning Dawkins reminded me of this), was The History of God, by Karen Armstrong. This probably should be in my top 5. It is a cracking book that really educated me: written by an ex-catholic nun, it describes and explains the history of monotheism (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) and by doing so, reveals the close links between them, and the very human manner of their evolution as pragmatic ideas to aid the development of society, etc. One is left with a well rounded and sympathetic, yet atheistic, world view. At least I was. I was already an atheist, but this certainly helped crystallize my thoughts.
 
Victoria Silverwolf said:
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979). Because it gave me hints of a possible way to think about the mystery of consciousness, while delighting me with its wit and imagination.
Click to expand...

I'm curious to know how you approached reading this extraordinary book.

Have you discovered Nicholas Humphrey yet? ;)
 
Bick said:
One is left with a well rounded and sympathetic, yet atheistic, world view. At least I was. I was already an atheist, but this certainly helped crystallize my thoughts.
Click to expand...

Though I haven't read that book, I'm surprised her worldview came across as atheist in that, as her The Case For God presents a much more mystical one, in my opinion. She certainly has little truck with Dawkins. (Having said that, the title is misleading, as she does not present a case for the existence of any monotheistic god, and there's no attempt to persuade the reader to anything they're not already comfortable with.) Definitely agree with the well-rounded and sympathetic, though. (And with SP about A Short History of Myth.)
 
Like Fried Egg, a lot of books that influenced me were non-fiction, but I'll try to list mostly fiction.

It's hard to list only five.


A lot of these books will be from my "formative" years, so to speak.

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein (and pretty much anything he's written).
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead by David Shields
Animal Farm by George Orwell

I only have four. It was too hard to nail down a fifth.
 
Star Surgeon by Alan E. Nourse

It wasn't so much the ideas in the book but the fact that it was more than good enough to make me seek out more SF books. I remember it but not the 2nd or 3rd SF book I read.

Orphans of the Sky by Robert Heinlein

I think that is the first book that introduced me to the concept of mutations and not thinking what everybody around you thinks because they could all be wrong.

The Screwing of the Average Man by David Hapgood

It shows that all of our economists are wrong. LOL

psik
 
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